Book Review: The Last of the Wine
Jul. 29th, 2021 07:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI have finished Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine! Or, as I have taken to calling it, “Mary Renault’s ancient Greek philosopher RPF,” because Alexias meets MANY philosophers in this book. Clearly you couldn’t walk through Athens in the time of Socrates (or Sokrates, as the book spells it) without knocking over a philosopher, but also Renault wants to cram in ALL the philosophers. There’s a random cameo near the end of the two Thebans from the Phaedo. Why not!
But the book is also a love story, recounting Alexias’ love affair with Lysis. The characters get together pretty early in the book, because why shouldn’t they? It’s Athens, everyone approves more or less (sometimes people make dirty jokes but that’s just how humans are about sex), and they have exactly the right age gap to make it maximally socially acceptable, so have at!
So rather than a story about how they got together, it’s a story about how their love affair developed over time and how the onrush of current events (the war with Sparta, which is going well until it’s a disaster) shaped their lives.
As usual with Renault it’s not super clear when the characters actually sleep together. My impression is that they’re trying to follow Sokrates’ advice to love chastely, and stray from that path only after the boar hunt, when Lysis is upset about Alexias’ near death and Alexias, his garland falling from his head, is all “I am here.” The garland seems symbolic. And not too long after, Alexias muses about how he’s yoked a horse of gold to a horse of mud, and because they’ve brought a sexual element into the relationship, Lysis will tire of him now that Alexias is getting older.
However, there’s a fic on AO3 built on the premise that they definitely did it earlier, when Alexias cut his foot by the sea, and Lysis is going to carry him up past the beach… but once he puts his arms around Alexias they both just kind of freeze, and then Lysis kneels to suck the blood from the cut on Alexias’ foot. I thought that was displacement, but of course like the garland it could be symbolism. Who can tell!
Speaking of which, is the scene near the end where Lysis tells Alexias that he’s going to sacrifice at the temple of Eros a polite way of saying “our love affair is over”? Or of saying “I’m going to start sleeping with my young wife now”? Alexias’ reacts as if this is a painful conversation, but it’s not clear to me exactly what it means.
Also, oh my God, I’m starting to think maybe Renault has a Thing for Oedipus complexes, the way that Philippa Gregory has a Thing for sibling incest although mercifully without explicit sexual activity on the page; but Laurie’s attitude toward his mother in The Charioteer is so weird, and here Alexias has so much sexual tension with his stepmother (hot! Young! A mere eight years older than he is!) that his father actually accuses him of sleeping with her, and Alexias runs away into the hills, as you do! Until he collapses of exhaustion and sobs and castigates himself because he is guilty in his HEART.
(Alexias’s father is the actual worst and would have no children at all if people didn’t keep ignoring him when he insists that this or that child should be exposed to the elements.)
I’ve gotta respect Renault’s dedication to this Oedipus complex, though, because later on Alexias gets his first girlfriend and she’s old enough to be his mother. (He literally meets her by the grave of her sixteen-year-old son, which is just three or four years younger than Alexias at that point.) He and Lysis have a dinner party with their two girlfriends which for UTTERLY MYSTERIOUS reasons does not go well, can’t imagine why.
Also Renault kills Lysis near the end, because WHY NOT, I guess. Given Renault’s dedication to slamming a knife hilt-deep in the reader’s chest with her endings, I kind of expected this - it was either that or the death of Socrates - but this only slightly lessened the blow.
But the book is also a love story, recounting Alexias’ love affair with Lysis. The characters get together pretty early in the book, because why shouldn’t they? It’s Athens, everyone approves more or less (sometimes people make dirty jokes but that’s just how humans are about sex), and they have exactly the right age gap to make it maximally socially acceptable, so have at!
So rather than a story about how they got together, it’s a story about how their love affair developed over time and how the onrush of current events (the war with Sparta, which is going well until it’s a disaster) shaped their lives.
As usual with Renault it’s not super clear when the characters actually sleep together. My impression is that they’re trying to follow Sokrates’ advice to love chastely, and stray from that path only after the boar hunt, when Lysis is upset about Alexias’ near death and Alexias, his garland falling from his head, is all “I am here.” The garland seems symbolic. And not too long after, Alexias muses about how he’s yoked a horse of gold to a horse of mud, and because they’ve brought a sexual element into the relationship, Lysis will tire of him now that Alexias is getting older.
However, there’s a fic on AO3 built on the premise that they definitely did it earlier, when Alexias cut his foot by the sea, and Lysis is going to carry him up past the beach… but once he puts his arms around Alexias they both just kind of freeze, and then Lysis kneels to suck the blood from the cut on Alexias’ foot. I thought that was displacement, but of course like the garland it could be symbolism. Who can tell!
Speaking of which, is the scene near the end where Lysis tells Alexias that he’s going to sacrifice at the temple of Eros a polite way of saying “our love affair is over”? Or of saying “I’m going to start sleeping with my young wife now”? Alexias’ reacts as if this is a painful conversation, but it’s not clear to me exactly what it means.
Also, oh my God, I’m starting to think maybe Renault has a Thing for Oedipus complexes, the way that Philippa Gregory has a Thing for sibling incest although mercifully without explicit sexual activity on the page; but Laurie’s attitude toward his mother in The Charioteer is so weird, and here Alexias has so much sexual tension with his stepmother (hot! Young! A mere eight years older than he is!) that his father actually accuses him of sleeping with her, and Alexias runs away into the hills, as you do! Until he collapses of exhaustion and sobs and castigates himself because he is guilty in his HEART.
(Alexias’s father is the actual worst and would have no children at all if people didn’t keep ignoring him when he insists that this or that child should be exposed to the elements.)
I’ve gotta respect Renault’s dedication to this Oedipus complex, though, because later on Alexias gets his first girlfriend and she’s old enough to be his mother. (He literally meets her by the grave of her sixteen-year-old son, which is just three or four years younger than Alexias at that point.) He and Lysis have a dinner party with their two girlfriends which for UTTERLY MYSTERIOUS reasons does not go well, can’t imagine why.
Also Renault kills Lysis near the end, because WHY NOT, I guess. Given Renault’s dedication to slamming a knife hilt-deep in the reader’s chest with her endings, I kind of expected this - it was either that or the death of Socrates - but this only slightly lessened the blow.
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Date: 2021-07-29 11:52 am (UTC)It is, in fact, #3 on Danny M. Lavery's guide to telling if you are a character in a Mary Renault novel:
"It’s genuinely unclear to me if you have had sex with your best friend or not. Like, there was a scene where you two were laying down together, and then in the next scene there’s a throwaway line about how the light has changed, and several paragraphs earlier there’s a bit that only makes sense if you two are now understood as having established a sexual relationship, but no one ever mentions it again, and it seems to require a time jump in order to work in the narrative?"
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Date: 2021-07-29 12:33 pm (UTC)also “your mom is, you know, hoo boy“
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Date: 2021-07-29 01:42 pm (UTC)(Although actually Alexias's stepmother in this one is actually pretty chill and there's STILL lots of Oedipal stuff, so clearly you can do it if you try hard enough.)
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Date: 2021-07-29 06:43 pm (UTC)It's in Return to Night, too. Which makes it all the more disappointing that her take on Hippolytos and Phaidra in The Bull from the Sea sucks so much, but I really don't like that book anyway.
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Date: 2021-07-29 06:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-29 06:57 pm (UTC)I remain fond of The King Must Die even though its historical accuracy is a lot of beautifully described and materially convincing ha ha ha nope. Its bull-leaping is worthwhile.
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Date: 2021-07-29 08:18 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2021-07-29 08:28 pm (UTC)That's great (and hc point noted)
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Date: 2021-07-29 02:15 pm (UTC)I dunno re Eros, because he's the god of passion and lust? Like, he shoots his arrows at people and they become overcome and do extremely stupid things for love/sex. He wasn't just associated with het couples, either, I think all that came later with Cupid. But people also sacrificed to him when hoping for a successful courtship or fertility in marriage, and there's an argument that he's maybe a fertility aspect of Aphrodite, who is associated more with non-married love. Like most things in Renault, it can be seen as ambiguous. But if he means "I'm going to sacrifice to Eros in the hopes of fertility," yeah, that means he's going to fuck his wife because that's what het marriage was for really.
That book was mildly popular when I was at St John's (the Renault book everyone had read was Persian Boy, I don't think Charioteer had had its big boom quite yet) because it seems to offer a first-hand look at Socrates without always being seen through Plato, but I found it kind of disappointing in that respect. It's been a long, long time since I read it though.
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Date: 2021-07-29 04:00 pm (UTC)I think from context that Lysis must mean that he's going to start sleeping with his wife Thalia. Of course, that wouldn't actually stop him from sleeping with Alexias, but I think maybe Alexias is feeling replaced as Lysis's Very Favorite Person? Which I don't think is exactly fair (but then, when are feelings ever fair?): Lysis is excited about Thalia right now because this relationship is shiny and new, but he clearly still loves Alexias, too. I guess it's not super fun to share the Very Favorite Person spot if you previously occupied it all by yourself, though.
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Date: 2021-07-29 04:16 pm (UTC)I think from context that Lysis must mean that he's going to start sleeping with his wife Thalia. Of course, that wouldn't actually stop him from sleeping with Alexias, but I think maybe Alexias is feeling replaced as Lysis's Very Favorite Person?
Again it's been a looong time since I read the book, but IIRC Doing the Duty with one's new wife would def not preclude sleeping with other dudes! Altho probably not until the SNRE wore off. But from what I remember Greek marriage was one of those ultimate life markers, from boy to man, lazy lover to citizen, &c &c., so Alexias may still be loved but he's no longer the center of Lysis' whole life in that way. (But there was always the link with other men which you could never have with your wife, blahblah. Unless you were Pericles.) Which fits in with the story being about the end of the Glory of Athens, except at the very end (I did remember this bit) there's the link with that glory being reborn in one person, Alexander. (With Renault all roads lead to Alexander.)
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Date: 2021-07-29 04:29 pm (UTC)Yeah, and although being demoted from center of someone's life to well-beloved but peripheral is tough, especially because by this point Alexias does seem a little bit uncertain whether his connection with Lysis will endure. He never does quite recover his certainty in their bond after yoking the two horses together, even when Lysis reassures him - there's a lovely passage where he assures Alexias that he's not going to get rid of the apple tree now that the blossoms have faded, because now is when it bears fruit.
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Date: 2021-07-29 06:41 pm (UTC)I am fairly certain my undying hatred of the misogyny in Funeral Games is one of the reasons I wrote one of my very few, in this case AU forays into actual historical fiction!
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Date: 2021-07-29 07:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-29 07:39 pm (UTC)The magazine in which it was originally published is defunct, but it persists in archived form: "ζῆ καὶ βασιλεύει."
(Because it's not in the author's note: the title means s/he lives and reigns and is the answer traditionally given to the siren Thessalonike when she rises from the sea and asks ποῦ εἴναι ὁ Μεγαλέξανδρος—Where is Alexander the Great?)
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Date: 2021-07-29 10:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-29 11:53 pm (UTC)Thank you!
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Date: 2021-07-30 06:03 am (UTC)It was like in "Troy", where my friend and I were temporarily distracted from Brad Pitt's abs by (a)the person in the background wearing the headdress from Priam's Treasure and (b) the fact that the wall decorations in Troy were the same as the ones in Persepolis/Susa....
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Date: 2021-07-29 06:39 pm (UTC)Reading this novel for the first time in ninth grade, I always thought that was their first time, but it is Renault, so the plausible deniability (at least at this stage in her writing: The Last of the Wine is the closest in style and feel to her contemporary novels; others of her classical novels are very clear about AND HERE IS WHERE WE HAD THE SEX) is the point.
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Date: 2021-07-29 06:57 pm (UTC)